Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 01:10:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Tellme Studio <developer@tellme.com>
To: michael@...
Subject: Tellme Studio program change
VoiceXML Developer,
Tellme has made many investments in VoiceXML over the past four years.
One of these investments was in the Extensions program, with the goal
of making VoiceXML a more utilized public standard. Now with VoiceXML
well on its way to standardization in the W3C and with hundreds of
thousands of VoiceXML applications in production, it is clear that
investment has paid off. It is time for us to retire the Extensions
program and invest in other areas. As of Wednesday, April 9th we will
no longer host Extensions on 1-800-555-TELL or
http://studio.tellme.com. Developers can continue to build VoiceXML
applications on Tellme Studio.
Thank you for your individual contribution in making VoiceXML the most
widely-used and successful voice standard in the world.
The Tellme Development Team

Taken on Ben Yehudah Street, a pedestrian-only promenade in Jerusalem. Business has been very slow the past 2.5 years.

Due to the threat of Iraqi chemical weapons, Israeli citizens have been issued gas masks. When you arrive at the Tel Aviv airport tourists can purchase one from the Post Office. Eerie. Here is a close-up of the piles of gas masks.

Ariella is checking her email from Daniel & Miriam’s computer. Their computer room doubles as their sealed room. All of our friends have one room of their apartment ready in case of biological or chemical attack.

We did lots of schmoozing and eating with our friends. Here’s a photo taken at David & Laura’s on Saturday Night as we were watching a tape of West Wing episodes.

Greetings from Jerusalem! We arrived in Tel Aviv early this morning, took a nap, and have been visiting with friends today. I’m typing this from a sealed room — Daniel and Miriam’s second bedroom serves mostly as a computer room but also contains supplies and has windows taped shut to guard against a chemical or biological attack.

We’ve got many pictures from the past week in Italy and Hungary. I’ll post them online soon. I’ll also take some pictures of Israel over the next few days before we head back to the States on Monday.

If you need to run both SSL and non-SSL Apache 1.3 on the same host, the most efficient way is to run two separate server instances rather than using <VirutalHost>s and mutltiple Listen directives.

If you use multiple Listen statements to listen on either multiple ports or multiple addresses, Apache needs to use select() in order to test each socket to see if a connection is ready.

If you only use a single Listen statement, Apache uses accept() instead of select(). All children can just block in accept() until a connection arrives.

There’s a long discussion about the inefficiencies and syncronization difficulties of using a select() loop rather than an accept() loop on the Apache 1.3 performance tuning page.

Excerpt from that document:

“Ideally you should run servers without multiple Listen statements if you want the highest performance.”

We’ve been doing this for years at Yahoo! No, it’s not Rocket Science; it’s right there on Apache 1.3’s perf-tuning web page.

But there are many examples of SSL config files floating around out there with multiple Listen statements. If the rest of the world’s engineers are anything like me, there is a strong temptation to find a conf file that works and just use it. The copy-and-modify approach is great when all you want is functionality. But when performance matters, you’ve gotta read the docs.